Chapter Text
“...But as he came to his wits and regained his senses, he got up from his desk and stepped out of his office.”
Stanley did not move.
He did not dare to move for some time; he knew that the Narrator would not care, would let him stay, would not reset him. Not until he closed the door or made some other choice further down the road.
So, he stayed still. He did not know what to do, and he was very afraid.
There were a few occasions like these before—when he just stood there, motionless, sometimes for what felt like hours on end. But it always came with tension. And no matter what he tried to do, tension remained.
But it wasn’t here this time. The strain on his muscles, the pressure on his skull, the strings attached to his joints were all gone without a trace, as if he didn’t spend the last god knows how many hours being forced to explore every single nook and cranny of the game’s world.
Very carefully, Stanley twitched the index finger on his left hand. The tendons responded immediately like they’d never betrayed him, and there was no overwhelming power stopping him, not even a hint of a pushback. No divine intervention or punishment for regaining control of his body.
The Narrator never cared for what Stanley did in his office cubicle. There were memories of crouching involuntarily on the dusty carpet there for a good couple of minutes without a single comment from the mysterious voice.
That was, perhaps, the biggest blessing Stanley had ever been given in his life. Slowly, he sat down on the floor and with trembling hands pressed his mouth shut. Producing sounds was not a thing the Tension-Controlled Stanley did, so he pushed back the sobs and queited his breath—his hyperventilation—as much as he could. He didn’t know what would happen if he was discovered or what could discover him. At the very least, even though speaking had not been the reason to do it before, the Narrator had the powers to perform a reset. It could return the tension.
Stanley softly whimpered into his hands.
And stilled once again, very, very afraid. But there were no comments from the Narrator, and eventually Stanley—well, not relaxed but at least stopped being so unmoving. He exhaled shakily, stood back up and took a step forward. And then another one, and another, until he was out of the Room 427.
“All of his coworkers were gone. What could it mean? Stanley decided to go to the meeting room; perhaps he had simply missed a memo.”
The Narrator was, as usual, both an omnidirectional sound surrounding the whole room and a voice speaking directly into Stanley’s head. The feeling had once been dizzying—but he got used to it such a long time ago, he almost couldn’t imagine hearing someone talk in any other way.
Stanley rummaged around the office, taking his time. Nothing was out of the ordinary; the Narrator gave his usual quip about this not advancing the story in exactly the same tone as hundreds of times before. There was a meaning to this beyond confirming that only the tension was gone but nothing else—these simple menial exercises, turning computers off and clicking phone buttons, helped Stanley to concentrate on thinking.
He was pretty sure that between his own explorations and the times he was puppeteered around, he’d seen everything the game had to offer. Most endings were due to the Narrator—or, sometimes, an external force—resetting. Really, the only ending where Stanley was in control of the inevitable reset was the one with a platform in space and a ledge—but he cringed remembering climbing the stairs with a broken leg. Before, he did it from pure spite in order to snatch even a smidge of power for himself. But tension removed even that. Walking with his injured body protesting every step was liberating when it was his choice to make; when forced to do so, it was just painful.
And even if he did it as himself again, what was the point? He assumed that as long as he stayed in this branch of the story, he would be free from outside interference, while a restart could lead to losing his body to tension once again. This was based on two shaky facts: one of the weirder endings and that he’d lost control for the first time at the very beginning of a reset. But it also meant that the safest bet was sitting in darkness—for how long, forever? The Narrator would read off his stupid script, then fall silent, abandoning Stanley until the latter tried to kill himself.
Playing the tug of war with a disembodied voice for some could be, how the Narrator himself would put it, “soul-rending.” But Stanley didn’t hate it. He was determined. He would win—and be free.
He couldn’t do it when something was walking his body around, but neither could he do it if he stayed in one place and one timeline forever. He’d tried before, and each time, the Narrator either had infinite patience or simply left the game until Stanley moved the plot further along.
As Stanley, consumed by his thoughts, walked past the Bucket of Reassurance, he felt it calling to him. Metaphorically. The buckets didn’t actually speak.
This one, together with some new paths and choices, appeared long after the tension overwhelmed him. He had never taken it into his hands of his own volition.
Stanley eyed the bucket longingly.
He almost reached out to it before stopping himself. There was a certain path without the bucket’s involvement that he had not been aware of by the time he lost control. The one he’d thought about just a minute ago, when he was considering his options. In the room where he answered the call of “his wife,” tension had jerked him to plug off the phone. Stanley couldn’t remember if he hadn’t even considered the possibility prior to that or if the cable hadn’t even been there in his early days in the game.
That choice—in a manner of speaking—led to some of the most bizarre events he’d ever seen in his time there. Despite being made to relieve the ending several times, Stanley felt a headache incoming when he tried to properly recollect everything regarding it. But the events in their entirety were not that important; what stood out to Stanley were two moments that seared themselves into his memory.
Firstly, the alternate Boss’s office had a voice receiver. Despite tension flawlessly commandeering his body, it couldn’t—or wouldn’t—let him speak, much to the Narrator’s chagrin. He wasn’t talkative in the first place, for obvious reasons, but he had said some words to the Narrator long before the whole tension thing started, who had naturally assumed that he was able to speak. So, some of the narration included saying whatever it believed Stanley would say in the situation. It was always incorrect, and at some point, Stanley amused himself by trying to say the opposite of the Narrator’s script—at least as a word or two utterly crushing any hopes he had of Stanley’s compliance.
However, the controlled version of him was always utterly silent. On the rational level, it was a fascinating puzzle—after all, his vocal cords were also under the mysterious influence together with the rest of his body, he had checked—but emotionally, Stanley loathed the idea of tension too much to ponder about that.
He was willing to accept at this point that he was free at least until the next reset; he spent quite a few minutes fiddling with items in the rooms before the two doors, and nothing indicated that he was going to lose the control of his body any time soon. If speaking under his breath wouldn’t spook the Narrator enough to restart the game, Stanley could practice and then say the code out loud when the time came.
There was no telling what would happen then. He didn’t even know if Tension-Controlled Stanley went off script with his silence or not, but the ending had been repeated several times with each attempt going the same way. Perhaps, whatever was piloting his body had known that it was crucial to remain silent there for some reason.
But even if the plan How The Heck Do I Vocalize The Numbers didn’t go well, there was a backup one, based on his second memory. It was, most likely, the only path with a failsafe.
Finally settled on a course of action, Stanley affectionately patted the bucket—he could have sworn the Narrator made a strange noise at that which the voice hadn’t made before, but maybe it was his head playing tricks—and came to a set of two open doors.
To the right, then through the lounge (he was forced to spend so much more time here compared to when he was autonomous…), then forward despite the Narrator’s suggestion. Forward some more, a memory of a few cycles where the game resetted only for the tension to throw him off the cargo lift repeatedly, don’t think of it, forward, into the storage room and ahead to the ringing phone.
He pulled the cord.
“Oh, no no no no! You can't— Did you just unplug the phone?”
A minute of blabbering confusion from the Narrator, and then Stanley got called not Stanley but rather a real person. What a misnomer—Stanley was real, thankyouverymuch, and probably more of a person than the thing that took his scraps of agency away.
Still, that was a win. He was in.
While the PSA video on choice was playing—it sounded about right, but there was something slightly off about the presentation, even if Stanley couldn’t put a finger on it—he practiced the password, hoping that the Narrator would be listening to the video and not him. The flow of the game changed unpredictably when Stanley used his foreknowledge in any scenario; it seemed like the Narrator didn’t expect him to remember the resets. That meant that if Stanley wanted everything to go smoothly, he needed to deviate from the script as little as possible.
“Night. Shark. Night. Shark.”
Thank gods these aren’t grammatically correct sentences. Imagine trying to say “the shark flies through the night,” he thought to himself as his mouth repeated the words over and over.
“Night. Fish,” no, wrong, “Shark. Shark fish?”
Sharks are fish. It’s dolphins and whales that are mammals. Why am I thinking about this?! Concentrate, Stanley.
As soon as the video ended, he switched from full enunciation to humming the words under his breath. He returned to the lift producing what felt like melodically-challenged music. And it was rhythmically-challenged as well, considering Stanley had to take small pauses to think of his further actions and listen to the Narrator.
“You'll take the door on the left, back to the correct ending, the story will have resolution once again and you'll be home free in the real world.”
The thought made Stanley’s heart flutter. The whole reason he was here, in the game, was to get outside. He didn’t remember any other details of his ordeal; he had no idea how the Narrator was tying into it, exactly. But he knew, the same way he knew about the Sun’s existence despite the lack of its light in this oppressively artificial building, that he one day would be free if he did everything right.
Maybe this was how he would do everything right.
He entered the left door.
After an almost normal staircase, limited but not much different otherwise from the one he’d seen hundreds of times before, the new office was jarring. Yes, Stanley had been here, but only when his body was not his own—now he had the opportunity to look around on his own terms and take all the consequences of the narrative contradiction in.
Except he didn’t do it. Stanley only barely moved his eyes as he rushed to the voice receiver. He almost stumbled on the small stairs, flew a few feet forward, and only got stopped by the desk.
He gazed at the ceiling warily (not that he thought that the Narrator was above him, but he had to look somewhere), but no commentary regarding his screw-up was interrupting the narration that was still going on about the receiver.
“Was this the code to open the door? Would it still work? There was only one way to find out.”
One. Stanley drew a small breath and spoke.
“Night.”
One, two. The Narrator fell silent. Stanley got a bit encouraged by that and continued entering the passcode.
“Shark.”
One, two, three. Next were the numbers. He continued counting to five in his head. At least the next two words wouldn’t be difficult.
“One.”
One, two, three, four. It was strange how the number one was so much easier than the rest. Stanley didn’t remember his life before the game except for bits and pieces not forming a coherent picture. But he was certain that numbers and letters used to be hard. Harder than full sentences.
“One.”
One, two, three, four, five. Something had changed when he got into the game. He had a weird hypothesis that it happened because he was utterly alone there. Loneliness led to his mind linking the concept of himself to the number one. One whole person in the damn game. Clear pictures were always so much easier to say than abstract concepts.
“Four.”
YOU USELESS SLAB OF MEAT—
The voice in his head was so indignant, at first he couldn’t tell it apart from the Narrator’s, who sounded like he choked on air from the sheer fury.
“How do you keep making incorrect choices?! I had a whole page of the script there, specifically in case you wouldn’t find it in yourself to speak up. It would have hurt terribly, both the game and myself, but at least it would be something!”
Stanley, who opened the mouth to try speaking the passcode again, immediately closed it back and shrunk into himself. The Narrator was rarely this angry, and with their past track record, it couldn’t lead to anything good.
“But you chose to waste my time extracting the words from yourself with a teaspoon only to fail at the end. Intentionally, I presume. You don’t even think I have enough dignity to be worthy of a plain refusal! Stanley at least shows some respect to the game and to the choices, but you… you think just because you are real, you are suddenly so much better than the both of us?!”
As Stanley tried to walk back some more, he realized he was already pressing against the wall. He knew all too well from the experience that talking would never diffuse the situation, but this was the first time in a long while when he genuinely wanted to say something to the Narrator. He felt in his core that the Narrator wouldn’t have been nearly as bitter if he thought that it was Stanley failing at the task and not a “real person.” If the tension that took over Stanley was somehow connected to the real world, if that was why he hadn’t had the access to this ending before it… His mind was racing as he hugged the wall.
“So now you are giving me the silent treatment, huh? Speak! Say something to me! Explain yourself, you pretentious—”
The world had reset.
Not entirely, though. Stanley was back to the room with two doors; the Narrator was in the middle of speaking at that very moment—unaware of the events of the past few minutes, as usual.
They could talk here, probably. Stanley could ask about the Narrator's animosity towards “real persons”—but first, he would need to prove his Stanley-ness somehow. After all, he wouldn’t have replied if the Narrator asked Stanley why the latter hates him; there was no reason to assume anything to be different if a seemingly “real” person asked the same of the Narrator.
Proving his identity would require going far off the script, though.
And Stanley still had another plan for this ending.
Before getting to it, however, he opted to go through the door on the left one more time. He couldn’t recall if the Tension-Controlled Stanley had tried to repeat the same choice here more than once, and the second shot at his original scheme sounded quite nice.
He passed the corridor and was rather relieved to see the meeting room still intact. He crossed it without any issue, but just as the broom closet came into his view, the world did its soft-reset again. Right to the exact word the Narrator was speaking the last time.
Just in case, Stanley took the left path yet again, this time moving slowly and deliberately. Despite taking perhaps twice as much time in the corridor, the rewinding did not occur until he was in almost the same place in the meeting room. He huffed as he got reset. That meant that no matter how fast he tried to be, the game wouldn’t allow him to redo that part of the ending; unfortunate, but Stanley wasn’t strongly counting on that in the first place.
The right door’s corridor ended in a defunct dead end. That seemed about right. He took the door to a now unpassable meeting room and listened impassively to the Narrator's moans regarding the game getting broken. One of the more histrionic utterances, however, caught his attention.
“To know that my story is now incorrect. How could I go back to that? I can't erase that knowledge. I'll have to live with it forever, reliving its impossibility forever.”
That was… strange, in hindsight. No matter how many times the tension piloted Stanley’s body through this ending, the Narrator did not mention this knowledge he was supposedly living with forever. That was in the direct contrast to the voice casually mentioning many other endings when they deviated too much from the original script.
Originally, Stanley had made this particular choice—aside from the obvious path through the alternate Boss’s office—because of another vivid memory he had.
Across all the previous runs through this ending, the game hadn’t stayed destroyed, despite Narrator’s best efforts. Stanley was back to the room with two doors, with the tension leaving him. The first time, it filled him with such joy, he didn’t even stop to think about the possible reasons for that before trying to move, to go somewhere like the Narrator had begged him to.
But he couldn’t.
He was unable to flex a single muscle. Not even blink, nor draw his gaze away from the wall. Just like when he was controlled.
And the joy got replaced by terror.
He was still locked out of his body, but whatever was driving him before was gone. Even after living through that ending a few times, Stanley still felt dread at the mere thought of being stuck like that. Forever. Losing not only his agency but also the ability to at least perceive the world somehow, to witness interactions with it—even if he wasn’t the one choosing them.
Imprisoned his own skull even without a disembodied voice to keep him company, as the Narrator back then had sadly declared that he would wait for Stanley—which he probably could do for an eternity.
Back in the deteriorating room that was the only thing left in the game, Stanley-in-the-present-moment felt bile rising in his throat. The Narrator-in-the-present-moment was still mourning his story—which would be back to just fine in a few minutes—and Stanley was somewhat glad to hear it. Not only because it was following the script of the previous walkthroughs of his ending, but also because he was having some sort of experience at the moment. It was a thing to be grateful for.
He briefly wondered if he’d make a mistake imposing this ending on himself—then quickly shut the thoughts down as panic started to subsume him.
It was worth it, he told himself. This was how the tension left my body, so it might be a path for me to leave it as well and finally abandon this game. This was plan B. There is nothing left to stop it anyway.
The world had reset.
And he was powerless yet again.
This time, though, he could feel his body react. His throat constricted. His heart was hammering in his chest.
Stanley was paralyzed, yet could sense everything. He botched things twice in a single ending, both of his ideas backfiring on him. Despite the crushing fear, there was one emotion rising above it.
The first thing he did after getting his body back, perhaps only for a single ending, was to make a choice wrong enough that he could lose everything he had left. Sitting on the platform surrounded by fake stars was, perhaps, useless, but it wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t known if this would work and wanted to test, yes, but he should have applied his head better. If he was not such a massive moron, he could’ve guessed that something like this would happen, so it could be avoided!
It was easy to forget how things used to be when stuck as a puppet for the tension. Lately, Stanley was directing all of his anger to it, righteously furious of stealing even the miserable parody of the freedom he’d had. Now, though, that anger got pointed at a much more familiar target.
Stanley acidly wished himself to stay frozen like this forever, because it was the only thing a self-destructive idiot like him deserved.
And the game restarted—this time, to the very beginning.